November, 2019, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: The Tragedy Of The Minimum Wage, The Delusions Of California Politicians,and The Failure Of Common Core

It is another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Let’s get started:

1) We have often discussed the fallacy that raising the minimum wage rate results in better lives for those affected by that raise. Our latest expose’ was in the following post:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2019/11/november-2019-part-3political-class.html

Donald J. Boudreaux, writing for the Mercatus Center on October 31, 2019, showed, again, how bad it can become when politicians do not know the consequences of raising the minimum wage too fast:

• He starts off by stating what we have always said: “Minimum-wage legislation artificially raises firms’ costs of employing low-skilled workers. In consequence, some workers who would have jobs in the absence of the minimum wage are cast by the minimum wage into the ranks of the unemployed.”
• In other words, the good news is that you got a pay raise. The bad news is that you no longer have a job.
• The majority of economic studies on the topic of politicians raising the minimum wage arbitrarily support the reality that for the most part, raising the minimum wage results in less economic prosperity, especially for those at the lower end of the wage scale.
• And that lessening of economic prosperity is not just the reduction in the number of jobs available or the number of hours available to work.
• Many times to make up for the increase in the wage expense line, in order to survive, employers reduce other expenses to stay in business.
• Depending on the industry, employees end losing fringe benefits that have economic value to both the employer and employee including free meals, free employer supplied uniforms, employee discounts, overtime work, company picnics, comfortable break rooms, employee recognition programs, reduction in leaving early or coming in late to work opportunities, Friday happy hours, etc.
• According to Mr. Boudreaux: “When government raises the minimum wage, employers can reduce the amount of nonwage benefits paid to employees. And so even workers who keep their jobs at the higher minimum wage might nevertheless be made worse off because of reductions in the value of their nonwage benefits.”
• Thus, to offset the arbitrary increase in wages from economically ignorant politicians, employers will make up to five business operations adjustments: employ fewer workers, reduce the number of workers’ hours, cut the value of workers’ fringe benefits, work employees harder or mechanize workers’ processes.

And yet, politicians continue to think they know best, i.e. raise the minimum wage, and they always ending hurting the ones they think they are helping, the low income workers in the economy.

2) We have recently discussed the reality that California Democrats/liberals/socialists have turned the state into a stinking (literally) mess:

• There is widespread homelessness across the state with almost 90,000 homeless Americans in just the two cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco.
• The large homeless population and resultant garbage issues in Los Angeles have led to the resurrection of the Medieval disease, typhus, and a real concern that the bubonic plague might be next.
• The pipe dream to build a high speed rail line the length of the state resulted in the wasting of untold millions of dollars before it failed miserably.
• The state is about $200 billion short of what it will need to pay future unfunded state government financial liabilities.
• Due to the state’s politicians allowing homeless folks to defecate and urinate in the streets of the state’s major cities without consequences, this has resulted in severe environmental crises as the cities power wash away the feces and urine into storm sewers which washes into rivers which is in turn used for irrigation.
• And finally, due to mismanagement of the state’s forests, the state is being ravaged by wildfires, killing people and destroying homes and businesses, wildfires that have caused utilities to intentionally cause blackouts to minimize the chance of wildfires.

Thus, it is pretty obvious that the state’s politicians, and the government bureaucracies it oversees and manages, is not only useless in California but actually dangerous. New diseases, wildfires, wasted taxpayer wealth, homelessness, they have failed at everything they have touched.

And yet the state’s politicians still do not get it:

• A lot of the wildfires in the state have been caused by sparking malfunctions of the Pacific Gas and Electric’s electric grid, sparks that have caused the wildfires.
• As a result, the state’s governor, said that changes have to be made, changes that may include having the state government take over the utility.
• Governor Gavin Newsom said the objective goal of any changes was to transform, Pacific Gas & Electric, into “one that better reflects our California values and will advance massive safety transformations beginning before next fire season.”
• Newsom has appointed an energy czar to figure out what to do including taking over the utility.
• Given the inability of the state’s politicians to get anything right, as illustrated by the list of failures above, does anyone really think that the state government and the politicians who operate it could efficiently, effectively, and safely operate an electric utility? Keep in mind that Pacific Gas and Electric is a regulated utility which means that the state government has always had oversight of the utility’s operation. 

And thus, the state, and indirectly the state’s politicians, have been a major factor in the failure of the utility to modernize and minimize wildfires. Yet, the governor thinks that he and the state government can get the job done. 

He and the state’s politicians have resurrected extinct diseases, have not resolved any aspect of the homeless problem and could not build a single track railroad system and yet then think they can operate a utility: State government representative Ro Khanna recently said in an interview that the state should nonetheless consider a takeover. “This is a case where public ownership would be much better.” Much better than what? Talk about being disillusioned and insane.

3) Common Core was a major Federal government undertaking that was supposed to make the U.S. public education system one of the best in the world. It is certainly not close to that today. Our kids usually do miserable on standardized tests when measured against kids around the world despite us spending so much more on education than other countries.

We have shown over the years what a failure Common Core has been when deployed around the country:

• Within a year or so of deployment in Maryland, the test scores of kids in every county plummeted rather than get better.
• Prior to being deployed in the state of Massachusetts, the schools in that state were ranked the best in the nation when it came to educating its kids.
• However, once Common Core was deployed it dropped to seventh best in a very short timeframe.
• Damning evidence that this approach to education was a failure despite spending billions and billions of dollars on it. 

And the latest results do nothing to disprove this failure:

• According to a recent article on the Western Journal website, the latest national standardized test scores were only marginally better than the results in 1992, 27 years ago despite spending untold billions and billions of dollars to improve those results.
• Math test results were trending upwards nicely until 2015 when that upward trend stopped suddenly.
• Not coincidentally, 2015 was about when Common Core was quite well established in our public schools.
• Results actually started going negative with fourth graders latest standardized test scores, just a little above previous scores.
• Eighth grade math scores were actually below where their scores were two years ago.

So, the Federal government, the bureaucrats that operate it, and the politicians that fund it and oversee it have been a complete failure when it comes to public education for at least the past 27 years. Common Core made our education processes worse, not better. We spent billions and billions of dollars to achieve this result. In the bigger picture, over the past three decades I would venture a guess that have spent trillion(s) of dollars to maintain a mediocre education system in this country. Insanity.

Okay, we learned today that: politicians continue to be ignorant when it comes to raising the minimum wage and the negative impacts it has on lower earning American workers, politicians continue to be arrogant, thinking they can run a utility company when the have proven they cannot operate anything else effectively or efficiently, and politicians continue to prove they have no idea how to improve education despite having and spending trillions of dollars to do so.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

California Political Class Insanity and Socialism, Part 1: More STDs, Higher Gas Prices, No Electricity

We have done any number of posts strictly focusing on the crises in different California cities, from going broke to large homeless problems to medieval diseases making a comeback. What was once the land of opportunity is now the land of impending disasters on several fronts, fronts we will be exploring in the next few posts.

Before going further, let’s review a few California realities we have covered previously:

• There are upwards of 30,000 homeless Americans roaming the streets of San Francisco.
• Without a home to go to, the city has made it legal to defecate, urinate, and shoot up drugs anywhere in the city including in public and on the streets of the city.
• This has led to a public health hazard and has caused the city to hire five full time government employees who go around the city each day in hazmat gear to pick up human feces and to clean the spot where it was found.
• Things are so bad that residents can use a city cell phone app to report where they found piles of feces.
• There are upwards of 60,000 homeless Americans in Los Angeles which is causing some of the same problems that are going down in San Francisco.
• Public defecation and urination in LA is causing health problems in that city which has actually led to the outbreak of at least one Medieval disease, typhus, and the concern is that the bubonic plague may also make a comeback, given how the exploding rat population has fed off of the garbage that homelessness causes.

The reason we are doing so is to point out that the state that has had the most far reaching intrusion into freedom and citizens’ lives, the state that has put its nose into every aspect of citizens’ lives, the state that has has misspent and overspent its way far down the road of bankruptcy, and the state that has reduced the freedom of its citizens the most is the state of California. The state is by far the most socialistic state in the union and has basically been ruled by a single party for decades, the Democrats. 

And since a number of Democratic candidates for President have basically declared themselves to be socialists, I thought it might be an interesting subject to explore, i.e. what would happen if socialism took over the whole country. What would it look like if the country took on the aspects of socialism and Democratic rule that has swept up California. Warning: the future is NOT bright if California is the leading edge.

1) One very sad aspect of life now in California is the skyrocketing incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Diseases that had been in decline for a while have spiked up in California. Syphilis, gonorrhea, and other STDs have seen increases of incidence in the past decade that often exceed 200%. These massive increases in STD infections has been concurrent with the rise in the homeless rate in the state.

And while it is sad that many more adults are getting STDs, the situation has gotten so bad in California that there has been a tremendous growth in the number of newly born infants that have the disease when they are born. This obviously puts them at an extreme disadvantage at life from their very first day.

Rather than list out all of the horrible statistics on the rise of STDs in California, go to the following link where a video has been put together that gathered up many local news reports that highlighted the STD health crisis in California:

https://www.patrioticviralnews.com/articles/california-diseases-are-skyrocketing-killing-infants-devolving-into-third-world/

2) For the past few weeks in the Tampa Bay area where I live I have been paying between $2.25 and $2.49 for a gallon of gas. It has been that way, plus or minus, for a number of years now. In fact, within the past two years I actually paid less than $2.00 for a gallon. Thus, in Tampa, and most of the country, gas prices are a great economic story.

But not in California:

• According to an article on the Pluralist website by by Audrey Conklin on October 8, 2019, the price of a gallon of gas has reached as high as $5.00 a gallon in some locations in California.
• The average price in the state is not much better, clocking in at $4.18, almost TWICE as much as I am paying and most of the country is paying.
• One of the problems is that there have been refinery outages in the state.
• In addition, California politicians (Democrats) made it so that the state requires special gas for environmental reasons, real or not real, which means the citizens in that state cannot use surplus gas from other parts of the country since it does not meet California regulations.
• The article quotes a local Republican politician who says that Democrats who passed these restrictive gasoline laws ended up adding about $1.50 to each gallon of gas purchased before taxes are added on.
• In fact, the state’s politicians, who are mostly Democrats, voted to increase the gas tax back on July 1 which pushed California into the lead relative to the highest gas prices in the country.
• An added insult in addition to the tax increase in July is that the law that increased the tax was mandated to raise $50 billion for road improvements but the governor is diverting those tax funds to climate change and mass transit projects so that now California motorists are paying more and getting less for their gas tax dollars.

So, state politicians increase regulations, increase taxes, add new taxes, and then take motorists’ tax and fee revenue and use it for other projects. As a result, many California citizens get stuck with a gallon of gas costing $5.00, double what the rest of us are paying. No wonder people are leaving California at greater and greater rates.

3) But at least if you have an electric car in California you can avoid the hassle of $5.00 a gallon costs. But maybe you have another type of hassle when it comes to California electricity:

• A little while ago, California was racked with atrocious and large wildfires that killed and destroyed people, livestock and homes.
• While Pacific Gas and Electric and their faulty equipment got most for the blame for the fires, one of the biggest causes of the fires was the faulty and stupid forestry regulations that California politicians had put into place.
• As fires recently start up again, Pacific Gas and Electric is taking no chances with their electric grid sparking more fires so they decided to just cut off electricity to about 700,000 customers affecting about 2 million residents, leaving them without power.
• According to Fox News: “California’s largest utility company instituted blackouts for its customers beginning Wednesday to prevent high winds from toppling power lines, which could cause deadly wildfires such as last year’s Camp Fire, which left 85 people dead and was attributed to PG&E equipment.”

Thus, while avoiding the high price of gas, some California electric car owners could not power up their cars due to the arbitrary cutting off of power by a dysfunctional utility overseen by a dysfunctional government and regulatory operation.

That will do it for today. What did we learn when politicians get out of control from a socialism perspective and stick their noses into everything in an attempt to build their power and reduce our freedom:

• The rate of sexually transmitted diseases rises dramatically:
• The cost of gasoline rises dramatically.
• The availability of electricity could go down dramatically, leaving one without power.

More lessons in socialism, California style, to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w